"If the mise en abyme often works in the artist's photographs, it manifests itself, however, by a particular movement, whose means and stake are to undermine the conventions and reflexes of adhesion that generally take place in our societies about the image."
Paul Pouvreau's work develops images made by means of photographic language using recurring components. Since the beginning of the eighties, he has been using so-called "banal" objects-elements such as dust, household utensils, cardboard and more recently plastic bags.
On top of these elements, a human figure appeared in his work in the nineties. A man, a figure, a character, perhaps the artist, with a face that is always imperceptible, is placed in a situation. This appearance is treated in the same way as the objects: in an anonymous, archetypal way. What questions the artist is the capacity of the image to deploy the visible without resolving itself to the univocity of meaning. Thus the cardboards or plastic bags, which he uses, carry logos or drawings whose referent refers by analogy to another subject. These objects, whose function is to receive, to contain other objects, evoke, beyond their container, systematically another reality. This one appears then in the image under the shape of a sign, such a cardboard on which is printed the drawing of a glass or plastic bags where are reproduced medicinal flowers...
The photographic referent of his compositions is not only that of reality but also draws from the register of images and notably from the History of Art. Thus the plastic bags with medicinal flowers are arranged in echo to the painting of genre and the bouquet of the Flemish primitives. By re-articulating the principles of plastic compositions of the image, Paul Pouvreau also plays with the dialectic real/reality. He sends back to back symbolic and subject, by composing, for example, a wall of neutral cardboards, by incorporating a cardboard with a drawing of office - this composition refers as much to the furniture element as to the social symbolism of an office building.
If the mise en abîme often operates in the artist's photographs, it manifests itself however by a particular movement, whose means and stake are to put at stake the conventions and the reflexes of adhesion which generally take place in our societies about the image. This power of belief and illusion attached to this one is always confronted here with the material and existential side of what constitutes it, builds it and conveys it.
The artist pursues the development of these ideas by realizing these last years installations in the space of presentation replaying the constructive principles of his photographs.
Thus through his work, Paul Pouvreau, poses as a preliminary a doubt as for the field of the representation. A posture which is necessary to him in order to question our relation to the photographic field and to that of the images to see or glimpse there what resists the real or the "simulacrum" of the image.